Excerpt from Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson, The Secret of Caring for Life (Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), p. 46-47.

Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee - zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

"Ah, this is marvelous!" said Lord Wen-hui. "Imagine skill reaching such heights!"

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, "What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now - now I go at it by spirit and don't look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

"A good cook changes his knife once a year-because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month-because he hacks. I've had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I've cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there's plenty of room - more than enough for the blade to play about it. That's why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

"However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I'm doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until - flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away."

Remembering Harriet McClung Eckles, by her granddaughter Nancy Gilbert

 My two grandmothers could not have been more different. Rosa, my mother’s mother lived a privileged life in New Orleans. Planning dinner meant going to the kitchen and giving orders to the cook.

But my father’s mother, Hattie, convinced that idle hands were the devil’s play

ground, grew her own vegetables and fruits, cooking, canning and preserving them. We ate heartily on those annual visits to Lawton, Oklahoma. Braised rabbit with milk gravy was the Sunday special: the rabbits, to my horror and fascination, were raised in pens in the garage.

Bunnies?!!!

Grandma Eckles was one of a large family that headed west from a small community in West Virginia; their father worried about the gene pool being too small. A sister, Aunt Pearl, ran a boarding house and was known as the fun-loving one. Fun, I suspect, played a rather small role in my grandmother’s life. Her school-teacher husband was more than fifteen years older. She always referred to him as Mister Eckles. A devout Baptist, Grandma was serious, stern, and not to be trifled with. “Behave yourselves,” my parents hissed at my sister and me when we helplessly succumbed to the giggles at dinner. Even my grown-up father carried breath mints so his mother wouldn’t suspect he’d had a drink with his cousins. At 18 he escaped to the freedom of Oklahoma State University – where he played cards and went to dances!

My grandparents’ modest two-story house had once been rural, but the town grew up around it. Gradually they sold off the surrounding lots (my grandfather’s dream of striking oil -- never realized) and the house, a kind of time capsule, stood amid a sea of suburban ranch houses. In front, stands of larkspur bloomed among apricot trees and trumpet vines draped the porch. Behind the house a huge garden went straight through to the street behind.

Best of all was the storm cellar. Just a few yards from the back door, it was a raised, grassy mound with an angled door built into the side. Beneath the door, steps lead down to a small, damp room smelling of earth where rows of sturdy Mason jars testified to the virtues of foresight and frugality. It was cool, dark, spider-webbed and scary. Dashing down the stairs, flashlight in hand, to seek and find a jar of strawberry preserves was a thrilling adventure.  Tornados never hit during our visits, but I loved my father’s tales of narrow escapes  – an Oklahoma tradition.

The tiny living room was dim and suffocating. A glass-fronted bookcase housing Grandpa’s set of the Harvard Classics loomed, out of bounds for children. Every chair had tatted antimacassars and every table displayed Grandma’s embroidery and crocheting.  Nothing escaped her relentless needlework...doilies, tea towels, hand towels, napkins and pot-holders --- all embellished. Every bed had patchwork quilts. Some were crushingly heavy -- made of men’s suiting swatches.

There was a real ice-box. I remember Papa touting the benefits of electric refrigerators with no success. Ditto for modern stoves. Grandma’s iron must have weighed five pounds -- but it did plug in.

On those sultry Oklahoma Sundays we all went to church. I was grateful for the cardboard fans stashed in the pew ahead --- cheerfully imprinted with the name of a local funeral parlor. Every year the minister asked us to stand and be introduced. I felt embarrassed – but important!  Behind the pulpit a painted scene of the River Galilee looked down on a sunken tub where total immersion was practiced.

I never got to see that.

Now, I think of my grandmother when I find myself complaining about not having enough time.  She never wasted a scrap or a minute. She was surrounded by trophies of time well-spent: like this quilt. I look at it and marvel...every patch has a story, every tiny stitch was done by hand. Her hand!  She, and it, are part of a past I will always remember and cherish.

They don’t make them like that anymore!

A richly evocative memoir of Harry Eckles by his son Robert

Papa

My earliest memories of Papa concern his relationship to his job.  Katherine would begin dripping his strong French coffee first thing in the morning.  Papa took a leisurely, hot, tub bath every morning.  I  had access to the bathroom and vividly remember Papa lying in the tub.  Papa was white skinned, hairy, and had a red cherry mole on his chest  Next, he daily shaved off his heavy, black whiskers.  I watched him prepare the shaving cream, apply it with brush.  I got to play at shaving.  He used Lilac Vegetalis as an after-shave.  I could recognize the fragrance anywhere.  Katerine had breakfast on the table like clockwork.  It included at least bacon, eggs, toast, jelly, and coffee, if not grits, potato cakes, or sausage.  Papa sat down to the table dressed for work in his white shirt, tie, and suit trousers with highly shine shoes.  Papa liked to say, “You may not have a million dollars, but you can sure look like you do.”

Occasionally, I got to go to work with Papa.  This included a walk of five or six blocks to the St. Charles streetcar line.  The fare was seven cents.  It was likely we’d stand.  Papa prided himself in being able to hang on to a strap with one hand and read a newspaper folded in quarter sections in the other.  The streetcar was noisy and lurched from side to side.  The conductor clanged a bell, to clear traffic.  He would call out major intersections:  “Napoleon (Ave).”,  “Jackson”, “Louisiana”, “Melpomene”, “Lee Circle”.  We got off in the middle of downtown at the Carondelet Bldg.  The Godchaux Sugar Company was on the eighth floor.  “Gotcha boy with you, huh, Harry”, said Willy, the custodian, a light Negro, with straight, reddish hair.  Papa generously introduced me to all his co-workers.  I still remember names like Mallory, Knobloch, Gates, Rheiman, but have forgotten many.  I even got to meet the boss, Mr. Charles (Godchaux), my uncle.   Papa toured me around the floor, showing me the safe, the key-punch machine and cards, and lofty view from the windows over New Orleans and the nearby Mississippi River.  For the most part, I had a desk, pencils, paper, and entertained myself drawing or making paper clip chains, until it was time for lunch.  Papa ate lunch every day at Tranchina’s.  We walked past a long crowded, noisy bar, before coming to the sandwich counter. A huge pink roast beef was being carved quickly and nonchalantly by a man in a stained white apron.  We ordered the rare roast beef au jus on a French bread “poor boy” sandwich.  Papa had draft beer and I had Barq’s root beer. I never remember a better lunch.  When Papa got home, he would fix mixed drinks to have with Katherine, to close the work day.  This is what Papa did for over thirty years.

All three of us listened to the radio in the evenings. No TV yet. “Amos and Andy” “Jack Benny”, Fibber Mcgee and Molly” stand out, along with catchy product commercials as LSMFT, “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. At first, Papa smoked cigarettes, then a pipe, and then quit (to save money for film). He could blow smoke rings. 

Papa liked to read the funnies (comics) and read them to me on his lap.  My favorites were “Red Ryder”, “Prince Valiant”, and the “Katz and Jammer Kids”. Papa says he learned to read, by reading the comics.  He enjoyed books as a child: nature books by Ernest Thompson Seton, novels such as Peck’s Bad Boy.

As an adult, He read the novels by Thomas Wolf, Norman Mailer, and non-fiction, notably, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, A Thousand and One Nights, and magazines such as Popular Photography, Popular Mechanics, and the National Geographic. He would refer to the Encyclopedia  Britannica when questions arose. An exasperated family would taunt “Get the book, get the book”.

I never called Papa Harry, but children addressing their parents by first names was considered modern, and Papa and Adele encouraged it with my sisters. But it never caught on.  As Nancy reportedly said, “Other children had Mama’s and Papa’s, not Harrys and Adeles.  Eventually, I began calling my step-mother, Katherine, Mother.

I’m not sure what Papa’s expectations were for me, but I could tell he was interested in how I turned out.  He once said something like, “I raising you so that you can get along with others (be approved by).”   Papa made significant contributions to my growing up; he ushered me through informal rites of passage i.e. my first haircut at Mr. Hubble barbershop on Magazine St., my first 2-wheel bicycle at age twelve, a 26” Schwinn, my 1^st shot with his Benjamin pump air pistol, my 1^st BB gun, Whamo-sling shot.  I think Papa discovered my 1^st pubic hair before I did.  Papa took me places with him like the Audubon Park swimming pool, zoo, the batture behind the levee to visit with the squatters and watch the river rise, to Goose Bayou to collect irises, and to the sacred halls of  the Whitney bank downtown, to meet personnel he regularly met in the course of his job at Godchaux Sugars.  Presumably, these were people who might be prospective employers for me.  I think Papa wanted me to have job, family, and happiness.  Eventually, I’ve become reconciled to these normal, but solid expectations, but not without kicking and screaming.

Written by Robert Eckles, in response from a few questions I had for him.

My step-mother may have had her faults, but “cruel” and “evil” weren’t them.  As to why the marriage broke up, as you say, I was too young to know.  I am reminded of Rodney Dangerfield saying jokingly, “ I was so ugly when I was born that the doctor slapped my mother.”   No, seriously, I was surely  affected by the break up, which no doubt started before my birth.   It was, I think, economic.   Papa, Ma, and Nancy left New York after the crash of ’29, jobless, and Papa hoped to continue his education at LSU in Baton Rouge (Susie’s birthplace).    However, he ran out of money, and had to return to New Orleans.   This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Ma left N.O. because she wanted to get away from her family, and getting away from being a “good Jewish wife”.  To be back, and dependent on her family economically was too much.  She is to have said to her father, “I don’t want your damn money”, and threw the bills in his face.   Hearing from you siblings it seems that her relation with bill collectors attests to her disdain for money.  Ma fell in love with Bradley, ironically a friend of Papa’s, who taught him about photography, which was Papa’s true passion.  However, the 30’s were tough times; Papa worked for Godchaux Sugars the next 35 years.  After Terry’s birth, Ma divorced (back then, a scandal) and left with Bradley for Hot Springs, Arkansas.  Papa lived in the French Quarter, I believe, near work, for about a year.  To complicate the story, he then courted, or was courted by, Katherine Sharpe, who was a practical nurse to the Godchaux family, and nursed Susie with malta fever (?) before Papa and Ma got divorced.  When Papa married Katherine, I was 3 or 4.  Ma and Papa decided that I would be raised by Papa and Katherine in New Orleans, and so I was.  They didn’t ask me, but, hey, the food and climate were good.

Written by Robert Eckles

  

 

It has been a busy summer. First, France for three weeks, renewing ties with Levinas scholars in Paris and Montpellier (Georges Hansel, Marie-Anne Lescourret, Catherine Chalier, Marlène Zarader), then a visit to Saint-Léons, to the "maison natale" of Jean Henri Fabre, and the museum next door to it. We stayed with Xavier Costes and his wife Renée: the former is the secretary of the Amis de Jean Henri Fabre association, the latter a gifted illusrator and watercolorist. Their home, or "mas" as it is called in Provençal, dates back to the early 17th century. To visit the fascinating Amis de Jean Henri Fabre website, click here.
The occasion for the that part of the visit (for which I got grant from Berry College) was an article I wrote on Fabre's work, and which was published (is being published--since only the first part has appeared to date) in the Bulletin des Amis.

To any and all other family members who would like to share their own thoughts here, please let me know, and I will post them.

When the first cold days came . . .

In those years the first snows would generally fall toward the end of September, at least in New England. It used to get colder than it does now, and it was in the season of those snows that we said good-bye to the Russian wolfhound, and to the cats, who were undoubtedly all called "Kitty-Cat," and to neighbor lady who would take care of them while we were gone. The house we commended to the great white birch that rose, firm and watchful, at the end of the driveway.

These adieux heralded series of metamorphoses. The birch tree would become a palm, tall and slender; the white mantle of snow that draped the frozen earth, gentle waves drinking the sands. My brother Michael and I would exchange our companions in parkas and waterproof boots for others, black and barefoot. The cold, shiny white Formica desks disappeared, and in their place was a lone, wide, old-fashioned dark wood table. Our Bostonian-sounding English gradually faded into the background, hidden behind gentle, rhythmic accent in keeping with that of our West Indian companions. The yellow school bus that picked us up daily was replaced by a gray donkey that we got up on in turn--Michael, Sammy the son of Polly the cook, and I. It always seemed redundant to me that the donkey was named Donkey, like the cats we had left in the care of the neighbor.

Three years had already gone by since our father began working on the book on the West Indies, three years during which we rented a house on the beach in Jamaica with Polly, her son Sammy and her brother Sunshine. Polly took charge of the whole house--of us, the kitchen and the marketing. One day I heard my father complain about her petty theft, and ask my mother to talk to her. But Ma never did it. Sunshine took care of the garden, Donkey and the two roosters. He was a young man, black, as was the entire native population, muscular, and as we were to discover, possessive. There was no doubt that Sunshine was industrious, and was recompensed, in addition to his salary, by the product of the second henhouse, to which he was in the habit of referring to as his own.

The routine of morning toilette in which Polly insisted in combing our hair was the only storm cloud over the horizon of our island life. First it was Michael's turn--a useless task, because his blond hair always looked as if it had been startled into disarray. Then she braided my skimpy blond hair and tied them with a ribbon that matched my blouse, choosing the right color from an endless collection of ribbons she kept in the buffet drawer. And last of all came her own son Sammy. I never understood why she went to the trouble, since his close-cropped hair looked like a black scouring pad.

The daily routine seemed to us less routine than pure entertainment. Especially compared to our life during the rest of the year. After that process was over, we would get on Donkey’s back in strict order and ride to the school, which was in an old English quarter a couple of kilometers from the house. The forty of us kids sat on both sides of the wooden table, grouped by ages in just one room, with just one teacher. We all went barefoot at the insistence of our mother, who did not want us to stick out. Naturally we stuck out anyway.

We would go home on Donkey, too, but with different turns. Polly always had a salad and exotic fruits prepared, because she had her own theory about meat. She said meat should only be eaten (in any form) with special meals, for example on Sundays, birthdays, weddings or national holidays.

One of the many games we thought up was to see who could swim the farthest out from the beach. Polly would watch from the terrace of the second floor to see whether any sharks were coming—although Ma had already told us that if we ran into a shark we were supposed to punch it in the nose, and it would go away peacefully. But Polly insisted that if she saw any sharks she would warn us by signaling from the terrace, and I always felt safer seeing her there.

We didn’t have to wait long to celebrate one of those dinners Polly considered worthy of serving meat with (in this case, chicken). All Jamaica was turned out it in festive attire. It was more than a national holiday. Princess Margaret was making an official visit to the islands. Our teacher limited himself to the teaching of the history of Great Britain, and particularly to the Jamaica’s responsibility toward the Crown. It seemed to us a bit exaggerated, all the fuss, but we were the only whites, the chosen ones to present the wreaths of flowers to the Princess. This sort of festivity ends up spreading to everyone, willy-nilly, and in the end it even made us think we were witnessing a great historical moment, but we were more impressed by the filming of From Russia with Love, which was being shot on the beaches of St. Ann’s Bay, and included in Princess Margaret’s official itinerary.

The entire island was attired for the grand gala occasion. White figures adorned with black heads floated down all the island streets. British flags lapped around the crowds. Endless calypsos were composed about the Princess and her visit. Government House sported a special guard in full regalia, in imitation of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

Everything went according to plan, with the exception of the theft of the teapot from Government House, which inspired even more calypsos. Polly, true to her manias, served us a delicious chicken on the final night of festivities: chicken cooked with tropical fruits, which we were to remember the rest of our lives.

When we got back home the next day, festive colors had faded into the gray penumbra of an American film noir. An old model black Buick with a siren on top completed the picture. Sunshine did not come out looking for Donkey, because the assistant police chief was taking his deposition in the kitchen. On the black and white tile floor a corpse lay sprawled, covered with a blanket. Mother, whining, was sitting next to the chief inspector, both warning us to no avail not to come into the kitchen. We could hear Sunshine telling the police that he killed his sister Polly because she had stolen a chicken from his henhouse. Despite the voices and sobbing, you could hear the silence.

Sammy ran to the arms of our mother, and Michael and I went running out to the beach where we sat cross-legged for a long time looking out over the ocean.

Sharon Smith-Hernandez

Fiction and the personal. An aspect of the meaning of fiction is that it makes the private sayable to an anonymous audience. This may be not just an incidental aspect of that mode of discourse, but its very meaning.

I find algebra refreshing. Should one speak of mathematical versus, say, "natural" languages? Is mathematics a language even? It seems to have derived from language. So-called "rhetorical algebra" was used by Ahmes, an Egyptian scribe, in the 17th century BCE (Rhind papyrus). It slowly leaves humanity behind, its symbolism relating only to itself. Pre-world? Language, vieille coquette (ou cocotte), always seducing, convincing, cajoling.

The extension of the concept of cognitive dissonance to the moral realm produces interesting results. The dictum that truth is the first casualty of war is another way of expressing the process of suppressing lucidity in order to carry out the pressing agenda of the ego, unencumbered by conscience.

The new book by David Cay Johnston: Perfectly Legal. Brian Lamb's interview of the man on Booknotes, C-Span. Lamb is amazing in his breadth of interests. And what a scandal it is, the tax shelter business and all the devious ways corporate executives have of playing the tax laws in their favor! The rest of us are to busy working to lift our heads from the traces and see what is befalling us: the growing tribe of gonifs. Exposés of this nature (including no doubt Woodward's latest) are the mitzvot of the modern world.

The Personal, the Impersonal, God. The pilings of my future thought. Not pillars, pilings, because they seek stability below the moving waters and unstable silt.

Today this song came back to me, from someplace in my childhood, and it is connected to my father, as if the chair were for him.

In the cool, cool, cool of the evening, tell 'em I'll be there,
In the cool, cool, cool of the evening, better save a chair.
When the party's a-getting a glow on, and singin' fills the air,
In the shank of the night when the doing's all right,
You can tell 'em I'll be there.

Hello everyone on the Smith-Godchaux journal. This is my first blogging expierence and I must admit it is almost like jogging. After having acheived filling in all the spaces correctly I am exhaused. I promise to get back to the journal soon with a story or something but I just wanted to know that I can blog from Spain. Sharon E. Smith

A make-shift translation of a story I wrote in Spanish for my next book which is called "El día después" "The Day After" which could easily have been written the day after 11-M but it wasn't; it was written more than a year ago.

The echo that thunders through the calcinated ruins is all that is left
of the world. The wind disperses the empty words from rock to rock.

-That is not the way it was.

-Of course it was. I was there, I heard it all.

These words with no meaning rise above the mountain and bounce back. No one hears them. I doesn't matter. They would seem to be words from a
conversation but the echo disfigures them. They become incomprehensible.

-She told me everything and it was not that way. She should know what
happened.

-She is the affected one even if she wasn't there. I was there.

The words roll along one after another like tumbleweeds, empty balls of
dead weeds making their way along the roads with no cars, the fields with no
cows, along the avenues with no trees. They accumulate and are thrashed
against one another. One story migles with the other within the ruins.
They climb over the walls and fall down the other side. The balls of words grow bigger and bigger as they pile up one on top of the other.

-I don't understand why you refuse to listen, don't you want to hear the
truth?

-I don't refuse to hear what you say. But you only say what you heard and
this is not the truth. I repeat, I was there.

And the no and the yes unite. One word fuses with the other within the now
huge ball which rises, rolls, crashes but does not stop. A big globe full
of empty words, with no meaning, with no obstacle to stop it and no ears to
hear its contents as it rolls along.

-To hear is as true as to see.

-No it isn't. I can hear lies but I can't see them.

The lies and the truth are confused in the world of lost words. A finished
world. The lies are trapped in the cracks of the ruins but the truth pushes
them out. They flow one after the other along the rivers with no fish out
to the sea with no seaweed, where the yes and the no, hearing and seeing and the ball of words are inexorably drowned.

Sharon Smith-Hernandez

The joy of making "to do" notes. Here we are at the source of the beginning of the differentiation between the the leaders and the followers, or the masters and the slaves.

Cruel and crude from the same indo-European source, kreue-. The same insensitivity.

How Hebrew echoes the disorder of a discrete passage.
Hebrew uses the letters as numbers. Thus the letters א, ב, ג, ד, ה, ו, ז, ח, ט, י (read from right to left) represent the numbers 1 through 10. The number 11 is represented as a yod (10) followed by an aleph, thus: יא. Fourteen is predictably יד , but fifteen is טו . Why 9 plus 6 rather than 10 plus 5? Because the combination of letters יה would be the first two letters of the sacred tetragrammaton, the four-letter representation of the name of God that is to be represented (the letters יהוה ). Thus the representation of the number fifteen bears the trace of an invisible passage.

Today is the day before Pesach, or Passover, which starts at sunset tomorrow. We will go to First Night Seder, at the Temple Beth El in Dalton, GA. The Hebrew Calendar still holds some mysteries for me. But one thing is clear, and that is the moon, which is full on the 15th of the month of Nisan, and which is the first day of Pesach (פסך). Nisan is the modern name of the "first month" referred to as aviv or abib (אביב) in Ex. 12,2 and Deut. 16,1. Aviv just means "spring" in modern Hebrew, and appears in the name Tel-Aviv (Hill of Spring). Astronomically, Pesach falls on the first full moon after the spring equinox.

After the great Susan's Surprise Birthday Party more and more names from my early years are coming back to me. Proper names. Nouns, are they not the solid, the skeletal part of that animal of words that we are? And particularly proper nouns, because their meanings are open, waiting for our personal biographies to fill in the meanings. The county surveyor's side of "Obtuse Road South" was not evident to me as a child growing up there, in Brookfield. As all roads are connected, that that one eventually leads back to 229 Whaley Street, Long Island, the scene of an even more remote childhood, is self-evident yet astonishing. Those memories are situated at different geological depths.

Gordon Hatch, Eric Staib, boyhood friends who lived in the direction of Candlewood Lake perhaps, not far from Danbury. We attended the same school, Brookfield Consolidated, where Mrs. Murphy taught mathematics. I had learned my times table up to 6, due in part no doubt to her technique of hitting you on your quivering extended hand with her wooden ruler if you got the wrong answer, when the school board was forced to get rid of her because of parent complaints. I have no systematic mastery of the rest of times tables beyond 6 to this day.

Greetings all!
Michael--thanks for the invitation to the blogging. It seems that it might serve as a worthy supplement to seeing all of the faces together in NYC last month. I loved seeing the Eckles and Smith siblings all together, which is an unfortunately rare occurrence! Being far-flung out here on the west coast, I relish the opportunity to mingle with family members when I get a chance. I wish there had been more mingling time. I look forward to the rumored posting of photos by Annalee on the web!

Yes, BIG CHEERS to Susie and Paul! How nice to have been able to celebrate both the birthday and the marriage. So glad that all three of us could be there. Tomorrow, Molly turns 12. I think I remember being twelve--it was a tenuous time. Molly seems to be pretty happy with it though.

regards,
Victoria Gilbert in Portland

Congratulations, Susan and Paul Garrigue on your marriage on March 18th at the Mount Kisco Town Hall! I wish you both great happiness. And what a wonderful 70th birthday, Susan, brought about by the efforts of your dutiful daughter Annalee.

Hey, Michael and all. I had a terrible time getting set up to blog (new verb in my vocabulary) because I tried to use a name from Tolkein as my password. Bad choice. All the names, even the very esoteric ones, seem to be taken. Anyway, I have never blogged, and here I am. (I resorted to a name from Beowulf.)

My big news: I have a job, will begin in August at Jamestown College in North Dakota. I will teach British lit to 1765 and Shakespeare (and lots and lots of writing classes--but possibilities for other lit classes). The school is small, Presbyterian but very non-sectarian, and they like me and I like them. The town is also small, but maybe I will be able to buy a house eventually because housing is quite inexpensive there. This summer will therefore be busy: I work at Baylor until July 6; then I will be moving onto a new adventure and phase of my life. I actually will be closer to Washington and my sons there, and much closer to Hannah in Wisconsin.

Cheers to all.
Becky